Materials

You must check with a technician if you bring your own materials. Everything we supply is laser-grade and safe.
There are lots and lots of materials that cannot be used safely.

Allowed Materials

• cardboard - very fast and cheap, incredibly useful for prototyping, but may well work in final designs
• paper
• plywood / mdf - we only sell plywood in HatchLabs
• acrylic
• other less common materials can be cut/ engraved as detailed by Epilog: laserable/ processable materials

Banned Materials

• any material brought into the lab will require a Material Safety Data Sheet to ensure it is safe for Laser Cutting & Engraving as outlined by Epilog: material safety
• The following list is composed using information from Illinois Tech’s Idea Shop. Please refer to their page for wonderful explanations on why these materials are banned:
  • PVC - releases very toxic Chlorine gas when burnt. Highly poisonous to humans and very corroding to the metal parts of the machine!!
    • This includes vinyl, pleather, artificial leather
  • HDPE/milk bottle plastic
  • PolyStyrene Foam
  • PolyPropylene Foam
  • ABS
  • Epoxy
  • Fiberglass
  • Food- because we use the laser cutter to cut many other materials such as acrylic

Material Settings in Detail

The Material Settings allow us to correctly cut/ engrave the our materials when the material has bee focused correctly. These are set in the printing preferences in Illustrator.

Vector Setting

The Vector Settings decide how fast, powerful and frequent we set the laser beam.

• Speed: How deep the cut will be so for thicker, harder materials we would set the speed to be slower. The slower the speed, the deeper cut.
• Power: How much laser energy is applied to the material. The higher the power, the deeper the cut.
• Frequency: How many laser pulses fired per inch of travel. A lower number means less heat, as there are fewer pulses of the laser beam. This is good to avoid wood charring when cut.

Raster Setting

The Raster Settings decide how deep the engraving will be, how powerful the laser beam is set, which direction to engrave in and dithering options.

• Speed: How deep the engrave will be. The slower the speed, the deeper (and with wood the darker) the engraving.
• Power: How much laser energy is applied to the material. The higher the power, the deeper the engraving.
• Engrave direction: Either top-down or bottom-up.
• Dithering: Dot patterns on a greyscale image. There are six different dithering techniques to choose from.